A Promise (2014)

Waste of time

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It looks pretty and, very slowly, seems to be building towards something, but almost nothing of a dramatically satisfying/unpredictable/entertaining nature happens. It has the appearance of a vanity project. Someone's grandparent had an interesting life, so their story was turned into a film, but someone forgot to include enough drama/characterisation/plot to keep an audience awake . A bright young man (played by a very dull actor) is employed by an older man, an industrial magnate. The young man is attracted to the magnate's wife ( a very dull actress) and vice-versa. The young man goes to Mexico, on business, and promises to return within 2 years. The magnate dies. The young man doesn't return from Mexico. Eventually he does. He and the magnate's wife can now be together. Nothing much else happens. The End.

I did not expect to see a movie that looked like the movie of the year and it's not what I've seen, but at least I've seen a movie that is well taken. You know from the first moment that the most important thing in the film is the reaction between them and that they end up together, of course, but at least it goes step by step.Rebecca is great, makes a role, for my taste, incredible. It was a long time since I saw an actress who showed me that I was truly in love and with her, I've seen it. Richard is not up to it, but hey, it's not bad. Alan, of course, is fine, but that's not saying anything new.It has a great atmosphere, it seems that you are fully involved in that era. It is appreciated that makeup, costumes and art work so well.I can not say the same about the address. While it is true that the film tells the tempo level, does not bore, is giving the amounts in parts, but then at the time of the staging, is not able to make a nice plane or move characters from a Pretty shape and give life to a plane.Photography is beautiful in parts. The interiors are pretty good, but the exteriors, the photography is a bit too white. It's not pretty The final stretch is too long, that also has to be said.

Tis a classic story of forbidden love told throughout the ages from ancient Greece up to the present day.I enjoyed it as much as it goes, with excellent performances from the cast. I would have liked to have seen more of the young theatre talent Shannon Tarbet, who plays the initial girlfriend of the protagonist.I thought that to update it for the modern audience an odd plot twist would have been good, especially for the men who might find this story somewhat ponderous.A must for those who like Jane Austen, male viewers may fall asleep!

It's no wonder that the film's budget was nearly $11 million. "A Promise" is truly gorgeously shot.It's equally no surprise that the US box-office take was less than $1 million. I don't know at whose feet to lay the blame for this soporific set-piece: casting? direction? I do know that this is a love story without much in the way of romantic feeling. Perhaps a boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl plot is way too predictable these days, but there was so little spark, particularly from the younger of the two male leads, that I did not even root for the typical outcome.It was clever, I suppose, to substitute "British" class-based accents for a story set in Germany to distinguish characters' social classes from one another. (How would the average viewer know a higher-class German-accented English versus a lower-class one?) And there were certainly other competent directorial decisions. There may have also been an anachronism or two, however, including a clunky scene near the end alluding to the rise of Nazism, but the timing wasn't completely clear (right after the war? early 1920s?), so I'll give M. Leconte a pass on that.May the great Alan Rickman, a highlight of this production, rest in peace.